Elite - in teletext! (Original engine, new graphics)

Mark Moxon has been porting the original (BBC Micro) version of Elite to a teletext-style output, using the Beeb’s Mode 7, which uses a teletext chip for display.

Up to now the output - mostly vector graphics - have been in monochrome, but now:

I’ve been busy adding colour to the trading screens in Teletext Elite, as an homage to Ceefax and Oracle. Ah, this brings back some happy memories! Still on-track for a release this weekend

The codebase is literally BBC Micro disc Elite, just with teletext graphics routines replacing the pixel routines. So this is the real deal… just in teletext.

Here’s a still from a very short movie:

It’s possibly a little quicker, but not by much. The underlying maths is exactly the same, I’m just scaling the results for teletext and using sixel-plotting routines rather than pixel plotting. As the maths is probably the slow part, switching to teletext doesn’t speed things up much.

The exception is the sun, which works on a raster line system, so with only a quarter of the raster lines, things don’t slow down as much when you go sun-surfing.

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I somehow love this, even more than the original vector graphics.
Now someone please port this to the Minitel! (I guess, there may be a memory issue, though… I think, it was just 16KB.)

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Mark has now released it, and you can even play in-browser:

Teletext Elite is the full and unabridged disc version of BBC Micro Elite, converted to run in the BBC Micro’s teletext screen mode 7 (so it looks like Ceefax and Oracle). For those of us of a certain age, this is peak 1980s nostalgia.

There are a couple of Ceefax-related Easter eggs in there too - see the instructions for details…

Here are the links:

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